Friday - August 01, 2014

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - won't last forever

With Mythic's shutdown we could foresee the game closure, ...but it could have been maintained for a few more months.

However, it's official, the game will shutdown on August 29th 2014.

Ultima Forever was far from being a real Ultima, but was not really bad. It has suffered mainly from its' awful business model (F2P + heavy microtransactions), but also from bad game support (no updated, no new content). With a fixed price and better support its' fate could have been really different.

Quite sad to say goodbye to another Ultima... Let's hope Shroud of the Avatar will be better and more Ultima-ish.

While the past year has certainly been quite the adventure – in Britannia and beyond! – that adventure is now drawing to a close, as the time has come for us to say goodbye. As of Aug 29th 2014 (11:00 AM EDT), Ultima Forever will be shutting down its online services, and will no longer be available to play.

This was a very difficult decision for us to make. We’ve seen the game through ups and downs, and hope that you’ve enjoyed playing it every bit as much as we had making it! Through it all, it’s been players like you who’ve made it all worthwhile.

To thank everyone for their loyalty and support, for our last month of live operations, the following changes will be made to the game:

Wednesday - October 30, 2013

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - Patch & Soundtrack

Mythic has released a new patch for the F2P Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. The patch offers some new content, and fixes a bunch of bugs. You can also buy the soundtrack on iTunes and Amazon.

Content

- More Dungeons!!! Seek out the new challenges that await you in three thrilling- new dungeons highlighting some rarely-seen parts of the game. Get lost in the Bog Spire… Brave the pirates of Smuggler’s Harbor… or Venture deep into the King’s Wood…

- Luckless Keep is now accessible at level 3.

- We’ve added a number of freeform quests to supplement existing towns and dungeons.

Friday - September 06, 2013

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - Review @ EuroGamer

by Couchpotato, 00:33

EuroGamer has a new review for Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. If the score of 2/10 is any indication it's not good.

So farewell then, Ultima. The title of developer Mythic and publisher EA's new entry in the series, an iOS-exclusive, free-to-play MMORPG-lite, is Ultima Forever. These words you can visualise chiselled on a gravestone. Make no mistake; this game has the surface of a vibrant fantasy, but it is a grasping and shallow product.

The free-to-play business model is entirely to blame for this, because Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar (to give its full title) is a game built around several principles that flow from it. Critics of free-to-play often focus on the money side of things, but really the specific amounts matter little. Ultima Forever rips you off with its keys, for sure, but it is their impact on how the game actually plays that ruins it.

This is a game built for idiots. The critic Ian Bogost once mocked up something called Cow Clicker to illustrate the banal absurdity of most freemium mechanics, and Ultima Forever is Cow Clicker with a beard. Everything is straightforward to the point of absurdity. Combat comes down to just tapping on enemies constantly. It really does. There are special moves, and you can move around to score backstabs or avoid attacks, but 99% of the time this is soul-crushing, mechanical drudgery. Go into a dungeon, tap furiously for 10 minutes, leave.

Monday - September 02, 2013

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - Interview

by Couchpotato, 00:56

Capsule Computers has a new interview with Carrie Gouskos the Senior Producer at Mythic Studios.

What made you bring Ultima Forever out onto iOS platform?

Ultima Forever was originally developed on PC, but always with cross-platform in mind so that players could explore together from different devices. After getting it up and running on PC, our next step was to put in on a tablet. We had some previous experience developing on iOS, so that’s why we chose that first. And when we got that initial build running on an iPad – something happened, like a lightbulb. It felt really good at that size, at that perspective, so we decided to release mobile first instead of PC. This had the added benefit of being able to bring this type of multiplayer online game to a whole new batch of gamers, while still being able to offer it to loyal Ultima fans. Our original goal is still intact, to expand to other platforms – beginning with Android. Of course, it will always depend on the needs and desires on each device, but we would like to make it available to as many people as possible.

What’s your main goal for this game for players that new to the Ultima series? What do you want to achieve with this game?

We want them to enjoy themselves first and foremost. We also want them to get a glimpse into Ultima’s rich backstory and world, one that has stood up to multiple iterations over the years. We hope they will fall in love with the lore as much as we have, but at the end of the day, if they just enjoy the game, either solo or with friends, that’s fine too. As a side goal, we really hope that we’ve been able to unlock a new game experience on mobile devices. For those of us that remember the first time we played in a vast open world, interacting with so many other players, grouping and going into dungeons – we want to bring that enjoyment and excitement to new people.

Can we expect to see more from the Ultima Forever series on iOS further on down the track?

We want to continue to support the game and obviously we want to give people more of what they want. Who knows what the future holds, but I’m pretty sure Ultima is truly forever.

Monday - August 19, 2013

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - A Miracle That The New Ultima Exists

by Couchpotato, 00:25

Kotaku has an interesting article about Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar writing that it's a miracle the game even exists.

The back-story behind a new Ultima game should be a horror show: Ultima—beloved role-playing game series designed by the great Richard Garriott who sold his company to cold, corporate EA and down the tubes Ultima would go, returning in 2013 only for money-grubbing reasons. Nope. That's not it.

Some of that is accurate.

Some of that is part of the secret origin behind Ultima Forever, a re-interpretation of Garriott's beloved PC adventure Ultima IV, transformed into an massively multiplayer iOS game and released last week for zero dollars.

The game is nearly a gigabyte. It's all hand-painted, 2D, top-down. At its creators' most recent estimate, its play area is about 11,562 iPad screens large (down from at least 15,000 because they had to cut some content). It includes 22,318 lines of dialogue—141,660 words.

The game comes from EA Mythic, which was briefly a part of BioWare. As a BioWare game it was going to be made for Netbooks, then for Facebook. It was going to be a PC browser game, then it was going to be downloadable, according to Forever producer Carrie Gouskos and studio general manager Paul Barnett. "It went from 2D to 2.5D," Gouskos told me. "It went from Zelda to Castle Crashers to Diablo light."

Saturday - August 17, 2013

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - Review Roundup

There's a definite pay-to-win feel to Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. You'll get further into this expansive fantasy world much faster if you invest heavily. It wouldn't be a big issue if the reminders weren't so prominent — every time you open a chest; every time you open your inventory to see the condition of your equipment.

But somewhere beneath the pile of golden keys you shouldn't buy, there's a quite good homage to a role-playing classic, waiting for you to rise to the challenge. You can enjoy Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar without paying for it. It just takes a little patience, and hey — patience is a virtue.

Beyond the bugs and pesky purchases, Ultima Forever is actually a pretty solid touch RPG. The controls work far better than you'd expect, and there's a ton of content to explore. It's also really, really simple to jump into a dungeon or two if you have some free time and grab a few friends along the way. That setup is exactly the way mobile games should operate -- but unfortunately Ultima Forever forgoes a fair premium price in favor of greedy microtransactions.

Outside of the rather pesky and game-capitulating key-rings, the game excels as a quick-hit hack-and-slash perfect for tablets. It’s incredibly easy to collect quests, join up with other players, and run dungeon after dungeon suited to a mobile schedule. Have 5 minutes? There are dungeons clearly labeled and ready to explore. Have 15? Look for something a little more substantial.

Tap and traverse your way through crypts, caverns, and bandit lords. There are reputation grinds and various virtues to level up. It’s nothing at all like the Ultima titles of old, but that’s okay – It succeeds admirably at what it is.

This title is particularly difficult to score because it is a truly excellent game when you take the repair element out of it. The issue with Ultima Forever, and I’m guessing many other titles we’re going to see as “mobile grows up” to take advantage of tablets, is that this element overshadows all else.